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But- keeping to our illustration, by which the body is warmed
by soul and not merely illuminated by it- how is it that when the
higher soul withdraws there is no further trace of the vital
principle?
For a brief space there is; and, precisely, it begins to fade
away immediately upon the withdrawal of the other, as in the case
of warmed objects when the fire is no longer near them: similarly
hair and nails still grow on the dead; animals cut to pieces
wriggle for a good time after; these are signs of a life force
still indwelling.
Besides, simultaneous withdrawal would not prove the identity of
the higher and lower phases: when the sun withdraws there goes
with it not merely the light emanating from it, guided by it,
attached to it, but also at once that light seen upon obliquely
situated objects, a light secondary to the sun's and cast upon
things outside of its path [reflected light showing as colour];
the two are not identical and yet they disappear together.
But is this simultaneous withdrawal or frank obliteration?
The question applies equally to this secondary light and to the
corporeal life, that life which we think of as being completely
sunk into body.
No light whatever remains in the objects once illuminated; that
much is certain; but we have to ask whether it has sunk back into
its source or is simply no longer in existence.
How could it pass out of being, a thing that once has been?
But what really was it? We must remember that what we know as
colour belongs to bodies by the fact that they throw off light,
yet when corruptible bodies are transformed the colour disappears
and we no more ask where the colour of a burned-out fire is than
where its shape is.
Still: the shape is merely a configuration, like the lie of the
hands clenched or spread; the colour is no such accidental but is
more like, for example, sweetness: when a material substance
breaks up, the sweetness of what was sweet in it, and the
fragrance of what was fragrant, may very well not be annihilated,
but enter into some other substance, passing unobserved there
because the new habitat is not such that the entrant qualities
now offer anything solid to perception.
May we not think that, similarly, the light belonging to bodies
that have been dissolved remains in being while the solid total,
made up of all that is characteristic, disappears?
It might be said that the seeing is merely the sequel to some law
[of our own nature], so that what we call qualities do not
actually exist in the substances.
But this is to make the qualities indestructible and not
dependent upon the composition of the body; it would no longer be
the Reason-Principles within the sperm that produce, for
instance, the colours of a bird's variegated plumage; these
principles would merely blend and place them, or if they produced
them would draw also on the full store of colours in the sky,
producing in the sense, mainly, of showing in the formed bodies
something very different from what appears in the heavens.
But whatever we may think on this doubtful point, if, as long as
the bodies remain unaltered, the light is constant and unsevered,
then it would seem natural that, on the dissolution of the body,
the light- both that in immediate contact and any other attached
to that- should pass away at the same moment, unseen in the going
as in the coming.
But in the case of the soul it is a question whether the
secondary phases follow their priors- the derivatives their
sources- or whether every phase is self-governing, isolated from
its predecessors and able to stand alone; in a word, whether no
part of the soul is sundered from the total, but all the souls
are simultaneously one soul and many, and, if so, by what mode;
this question, however, is treated elsewhere.
Here we have to enquire into the nature and being of that vestige
of the soul actually present in the living body: if there is
truly a soul, then, as a thing never cut off from its total, it
will go with soul as soul must: if it is rather to be thought of
as belonging to the body, as the life of the body, we have the
same question that rose in the case of the vestige of light; we
must examine whether life can exist without the presence of soul,
except of course in the sense of soul living above and acting
upon the remote object.
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